We performed a comparison between Lacework and VMware Aria Automation based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Features: VMware Aria Automation focuses on extensive automation capabilities, DevOps capabilities, preset policies and templates, and customizable user frontend experience. Meanwhile, Lacework provides ease of use, machine learning anomaly detection, compliance reports, agent-based vulnerability management, and accurate alert information. VMware Aria Automation can improve its multitenancy management, migration processes, and automation for non-experts. It should also extend vRealize Orchestrator Automation. On the other hand, Lacework needs to enhance its visibility, data governance, IAM security management, and detection of deviations and misconfigurations.
Service and Support: VMware Aria Automation's technical support is good, but not on par with Lacework's. VMware's support can be helpful but complex implementations may require further research. On the other hand, Lacework's customer service team is proactive, responsive, and constantly improving their product.
Ease of Deployment: VMware Aria Automation's initial setup is difficult and needs a team of engineers, whereas Lacework's setup is generally simple and can be done quickly, with some users utilizing Terraform scripts.
Pricing: VMware Aria Automation has confusing licensing models and is considered expensive, while Lacework has a fixed licensing fee per year with possible discounts. Lacework's pricing and licensing have improved and stabilized, and they are flexible with early adopters and customers.
ROI: VMware Aria Automation offers time-saving and productivity benefits along with improved quality of service, while Lacework reduces monitoring time and effort. However, the ROI of Lacework has not been experienced by all users.
Comparison Results: In comparing VMware Aria Automation and Lacework, Lacework appears to have an edge due to its ease of use, machine learning anomaly detection, compliance reports, and accurate alerts. Additionally, Lacework offers good customer service and support, and its initial setup is relatively easy. While VMware Aria Automation is expensive and has confusing licensing models, Lacework's licensing fee is considered affordable.
"With Wiz, we get timely alerts for leaked data or any vulnerabilities already existing in our environment."
"The security baseline and vulnerability assessments is the valuable feature."
"The vulnerability management modules and the discovery and inventory are the most valuable features. Before using Wiz, it was a very manual process for both. After implementing it, we're able to get all of the analytics into a single platform that gives us visibility across all the systems in our cloud. We're able to correspond and understand what the vulnerability landscape looks like a lot faster."
"Our most important features are those around entitlement, external exposure, vulnerabilities, and container security."
"The first thing that stood out was the ease of installation and the quick value we got out of the solution."
"I like Wiz's reporting, and it's easy to do queries. For example, it's pretty simple to find out how many servers we have and the applications installed on each. I like Wiz's security graph because you can use it to see the whole organization even if you have multiple accounts."
"The CSPM module has been the most effective. It was easy to deploy and covered all our accounts through APIs, requiring no agents. Wiz provides instant visibility into high-level risks that we need to address."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"Polygraph compliance is a valuable feature. In our perspective, it delivers significant benefits. The clarity it offers, along with the ability to identify and address misconfigurations, is invaluable. When such issues arise, we promptly acknowledge and take action, effectively collaborating with our teams and the responsible parties for those assets. This enables us to promptly manage problems as soon as they arise."
"The compliance reports are definitely most valuable because they save time and are accurate. So, instead of relying on a human going through and checking or providing me with a report, I could just log into Lacework and see for myself."
"The most valuable aspects are identifying vulnerabilities—things that are out there that we aren't aware of—as well as finding what path of access attackers could use, and being able to see open SSL or S3 buckets and the like."
"The most valuable feature, from a compliance perspective, is the ability to use Lacework as a platform for multiple compliance standards. We have to meet multiple standards like PCI, SOC 2, CIS, and whatever else is out there. The ability to have reports generated, per security standard, is one of the best features for me."
"The best feature, in my opinion, is the ease of use."
"There are many valuable features that I use in my daily work. The first are alerts and the event dossier that it generates, based on the severity. That is very insightful and helps me to have a security cap in our infrastructure. The second thing I like is the agent-based vulnerability management, which is the most accurate information."
"Lacework is helping a lot in reducing the noise of the alerts. Usually, whenever you have a tool in place, you have a lot of noise in terms of alerts, but the time for an engineer to look into those alerts is limited. Lacework is helping us to consolidate the information that we are getting from the agents and other sources. We are able to focus only on the things that matter, which is the most valuable thing for us. It saves time, and for investigations, we have the right context to take action."
"The most valuable feature is Lacework's ability to distill all the security and audit logs. I recommend it to my customers. Normally, when I consult for other customers that are getting into the cloud, we use native security tools. It's more of a rule-based engine."
"It benefits the speed of our development, and the speed of anything we test and send through to production."
"The most valuable feature is vRA’s ability to integrate whether with additional VMware vRealize suites or other vendors' cloud products."
"vRA has enabled us to derive value from the cloud faster. It is five to six times faster than traditional solutions."
"The self-service capabilities are by far the best that we've seen in terms of features. If the user is being able to log in and make requests himself, from the onboarding process all the way to the end, that's very helpful."
"I can make a blueprint with an Active Directory deployment. With everything prepared, people can start installing our products."
"The automation function itself and how to group and publish those groupings is quite easy for customers to learn with Aria."
"compare-to-competition; Citrix was on our short list. But over the last ten years, we have been a big VMware shop. We wanted to continue with VMware because we are confident that VMware can address any kind of problem situation, any challenges. But with Citrix, we didn't find that kind of credibility when we did solution testing, a PoC."
"We are able to provide self-service to all of our IT/development teams to expand and decrease their environments at will."
"We're looking at some of the data compliance stuff that they've got Jon offer. I know they're looking at container security, which we gonna be looking at next."
"The solution's container security could be improved."
"The only small pain point has been around some of the logging integrations. Some of the complexities of the script integrations aren't supported with some of the more automated infrastructure components. So, it's not as universal. For example, they have great support for cloud formation and other services, but if you're using another type of management utility or governance language for your infrastructure-as-code automation components, it becomes a little bit trickier to navigate that."
"One significant issue is that the searches are case-sensitive, so finding a misconfigured resource can become very challenging."
"We would like to see improvements to executive-level reporting and data reporting in general, which we understand is being rolled out to the platform."
"The remediation workflow within the Wiz could be improved."
"The reporting isn't that great. They have executive summaries, but it's only a compliance report that maps all current issues to specific controls. Whether you look at one subscription or project, regardless of the size, you will get a multipage report on how the issues in that account map to that control. Our CSO isn't going to read through that. He won't filter that out or show that to his leadership and say, "Here's what we're doing." It isn't a helpful report. They're working on it, but it's a poor executive summary."
"Wiz's reporting capabilities could be refined a bit. They are making headway on that, but more executive-style dashboards would be nice. They just implemented a community aspect where you can share documents and feedback. This was something users had been requesting for a while. They are listening to customer feedback and making changes."
"There are a couple of the difficulties we encounter in the realm of cybersecurity, or security as a whole, that relate to potentially limited clarity. Having the capacity to perceive the configuration aspect and having the ability to contribute to it holds substantial advantages, in my view. It ranks high, primarily due to its role in guaranteeing compliance and the potential to uncover vulnerabilities, which could infiltrate the system and introduce potential risks. I had been exploring a specific feature that captured my interest. However, just yesterday, I participated in a product update session that announced the imminent arrival of this feature. The feature involves real-time alerting. This was something I had been anticipating, and it seems that this capability is now being integrated, possibly as part of threat intelligence. While anomaly events consistently and promptly appear in the console, certain alerts tend to experience delays before being displayed. Yet, with the recent product update, this issue is expected to be resolved. Currently, a comprehensive view of all policies is available within the console. However, I want a more tailored display of my compliance posture, focusing specifically on policies relevant to me. For instance, if I'm not subject to HIPAA regulations, I'd prefer not to see the HIPAA compliance details. It's worth noting that even with this request, there exists a filtering mechanism to control the type of compliance information visible. This flexibility provides a workaround to my preference, which is why it's challenging for me to definitively state my exact request."
"Lacework lacks remediation features, but I believe they're working on that. They're focused on the reporting aspect, but other features need to improve. They're also adding some compliance features, so it's not worth saying they need to get better at it."
"The configuration and setup of alerts should be easier. They should make it easier to integrate with systems like Slack and Datadog. I didn't spend too much time on it, but to me, it wasn't as simple as the alerting that I've seen on other systems."
"Its integrations with third-party SIEMs can be better. That is one of the things that we discussed with them."
"I would like to see a remote access assistance feature. And the threat-hunting platform could be better."
"A feature that I have requested from them is the ability to sort alerts and policies based on a security framework. Right now, when you go into alerts, you have hundreds and hundreds of them that you have to manually pick. It would be useful to have categories for CIS Benchmark or SOC 2 and be able to display all the alerts and policies for one security framework."
"Lacework has not reduced the number of alerts we get. We've actually had to add resources as a result of using it because the application requires a lot of people to understand it to get the value out of it properly."
"Visibility is lacking, and both compliance-related metrics and IAM security control could be improved."
"I have not found this solution to be user-friendly. It's really complicated. The demo shows that you can automate anything but they only show basic scenarios. If you want to do anything more complicated than that, it becomes very complicated to set up."
"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components."
"I know you can spin up virtual desktops in vRA, but they're not thin-provisioned. I don't know if that's because the other product, Horizon View, is there, but it would be nice to see more integration."
"Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view."
"We have seen some issues with upgrades or installations. This means we have to raise a call every time with VMware."
"They should make it a little bit more dynamic, a little bit easier to deal with large-scale AD deployments. They need to make it a little more enterprise-ready. That is the one thing that kills us."
"The stability is okay, but could be improved. We sometimes receive strange errors, which can only be solved with specialists."
"We would like them to improve the automation part. This is an upcoming area that we would like to focus on."
Lacework is ranked 9th in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 9 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 15th in Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) with 133 reviews. Lacework is rated 8.8, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Lacework writes "Makes us aware of vulnerabilities and provides a lot of data but it's not easily understood at first look". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". Lacework is most compared with Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, AWS GuardDuty, Snyk, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Orca Security, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and vCenter Orchestrator. See our Lacework vs. VMware Aria Automation report.
See our list of best Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) vendors.
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